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On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)

I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite....

These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do)

Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words

Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words

Meta keywords – all keywords

Questions begin here...

H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages)

H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page?

Bold text – does this matter for SEO?

Italic text - does this matter for SEO?

Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data?

Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO?

Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image.

3 Responses

1. The visible portion of the page title in the search results extends to 66 characters, after which the engines will often truncate with an ellipsis. In order to optimize for the best possible title (and provide the most compelling call to action for searchers) keeping the title tag under 66 characters in length is recommended.

Correction for Meta Description:

2. Since the meta description isn't used for rankings, and the snippet cuts off after 156 characters (in most instances), it's unwise to have a longer meta description tag. Words beyond this count won't be seen by anyone.

Correction for Keywords:

3. Search engines have, for years, ignored the meta keywords tag as a ranking signal. Although it technically does not harm rankings, it can be used by competitors as a method to extract your targeted terms and thus, we recommend against its use.

H1-H6 Tags:

4.

a. H1 tag above the fold is a bonus

b. Use your Main keyword in H1 tag preferably towards the front.

c. H2 tags is used break down the main topic and is effective

d. H3-H6 should be used as sub topics only if it going to be natural otherwise it may come off as spam.

Bold & Italics text:

5. In testing, search engines appeared to have a preference (albeit slight) for pages that employed a targeted keyphrase with one of these elements than those missing it. This may also be valuable to users who can more easily find references to their search query thanks to this highlighting.

Image Alt Attributes:

6. Keyword usage in the alt attribute of an image employed on a page is surprisingly positively correlated with good rankings. It also helps considerably with image search, a popular and oft-employed vertical/universal search system.

Body Text of Competitor:

7. Body Text: I wouldn't worry about competitors, work on your own strategy

Headers are not as important as they used to be since they can be easily manipulated so I wouldn't put in too much time and effort on that. That being said, it's a good practice to use them.

There is no penalty for using same headers but its better to use unique headers for each page so they are not competing with each other.

Meta keywords: it doesn't have value in Google and other major engines at least - it could work against you as competitors can refer to it and easily know what you are targeting.

Bold text: it used to matter - but it's very less now - most likely has negligible affect now.

Internal link anchors can be duplicate - if you have a site-wide text link menu, wouldn't technically those links be 'duplicate' throughout? No penalties/issues. My sugggestion though is to vary it occassionally even internally to get most of it.

Image alt attributes - no issue in have same of it for the Social buttons on all pages. In fact, you don't want to tweak them and try to rank for some keyword. They are just social buttons...

Competitor: They are using DIV Scroll - I would be very careful in how I use it. It doesn't seem user-friendly as the box is too small and there is lot of content in it. I am not too sure if Google can discount it algorithmically but if their staff see it manually, it could be an issue. There is no 100% sure way to know the outcome of using div scroll the way they are using - as of now they probably do get benefit by using lot of text but using lot of content in a little box like that is not a sound long term strategy considering the risk of manual review and also with G-bots getting smarter

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